A variety of emission reflectors and reflector/sources are known in the art. For example, fluorescent bulbs have reflectors for illumination that are common in the home. Headlamps of automobiles have parabolic and other shaped reflectors for directing light. Elliptical troughs are used to reimage flashlamps to produce high intensity light for treating surfaces. Parabolic reflectors are used underwater to direct sound from sparker sources into pipes to control zebra mussels. Reflectors known in the art operate efficiently with either light or sound sources. For some applications it would be beneficial for reflectors to operate efficiently with light and sound sources, or sources that emit both light and sound.
Many commercial lamp systems use standard reflectors to deliver light. For example, to treat surfaces, a flashlamp is placed at one focus of an elliptical trough and the surface at the other focus. Because of practical limitations on implementing such reflectors, light source reflector combinations are unable to treat some surface areas, such as into corners, where adjacent walls meet with each other, the ceiling or floors, moldings, stairs, surfaces near any protrusions from the surface or other surface areas difficult to access. This is a disadvantage for paint stripping, for instance, because not all surfaces can be stripped of paint, so that a second technique is needed to complete removal. Most known practical implementations result in a light footprint on the work surface that is well inside the projected footprint of the reflector onto the work surface. In typical applications, light from the reflector cannot strip paint from about 10% of the surface area. In such applications it would be beneficial to have a reflector that allows all surfaces to be stripped of paint or otherwise irradiated by light or sound.
Impulsive and many other acoustic sources are omni-directional. However, in some uses sound output is used only in specific directions. A reflector that can reach surfaces outside the projected footprint of the reflector and that can direct light or sound source output in specific directions is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,672,729, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Orthogonal parabolic reflectors (OPRs) allow light or sound from a linear or cylindrical source to be focused into a small volume. Many orthogonal reflectors known in the art specify that such reflectors focus the light into a small volume approximating a point. However, for incoherent sources the output is spread over a large volume, with a large fraction lost and not reaching a small volume near the focal point. In some cases in which reflectors known-in-the-art are used with light or sound sources that employ electrodes, erosion during operation causes the source that is initially at a focus of a reflector, to erode away from the focus, and thereby diminish its effectiveness. In those cases it would be advantageous to have a reflector that maintained effectiveness even as the source erodes.